I'm working on emulation driver for S3-Trio in qemu / OpenFirmWare. It would be nice to verify that it actually works on the physical cards too.Is anyone interested in testing it? It's implemented as a bootable floppy.

My S3-Trio64V+ was not supported by the original OFW, so I had to implement a fix. Now I'm wondering if the fix doesn't break the older S3-Trio (32/64/...) cards.

Two levels of testing:1. "Hey, not too rough". Just boot the floppy, see if it gets to the "ok" propmpt, and write me the result with the name of the card (or chip).2. "Hurt me plenty". Remove the VGA BIOS ROM. Power on the PC, it will beep as if the graphic card were not present. Press F1 to boot (or configure BIOS to ignore all errors before removing the VGA BIOS ROM). Wait till it loads the floppy and one more second. Report if the screen turnes on. If it doesn't, try to see if the system responds to 'beep' and 'reset-all' commands followed with enter.

Let's see if anyone is brave enough to boot Forth from a floppy. Ah, almost forgot. It's for PCI cards. Probably won't work on VLB ones. I compiled the code for 486, but tested only on Pentium.

keropi wrote:I will also try it in a couple of days - when I am back at my cards. I have some for the "hurt me plenty" tests

Thanks! Do you by any chance have a Trio-64 (or -32), aka 86C764 (i.e. non V+ version)? If any of them works, I probably added 765 without breaking 764. Although from the comments in the OFW code I see there were quite some different 764 revisions and they had quite some personal bugs.

Anyways I think all of them (765, 764 and 325) are hardly existing outside of this board, so if it works for the members of this board it's pretty safe to assume it works for everyone interested.

If you're still interested, I can try to make time this weekend for your tests. Let me know which ones you're most interested in (if any). More info on these cards in my PCI DOS benchmark thread (see signature).

Trio64 V2/DX and Trio64V+ please. Btw it may also work on the PCI Matrox (without removing the ROM as it's soldered anyway). Although for the moment the Matrox is less interesting as it's not emulated in qemu at all, but maybe for the future.

So what's supposed to happen when you boot the floppy? I'm trying it on "Hey not too rough" with a couple of S3 cards, and in both cases, what happens is the floppy starts to load, I see the letters "ae" followed by a bunch of dots that fill the screen while the floppy loads, then the system reboots, does the same thing, reboots, rinse and repeat. At some point (sometimes after only 1 reboot, sometimes after 5 reboots), it stops with a black screen.

clueless1 wrote:So what's supposed to happen when you boot the floppy? I'm trying it on "Hey not too rough" with a couple of S3 cards, and in both cases, what happens is the floppy starts to load, I see the letters "ae" followed by a bunch of dots that fill the screen while the floppy loads, then the system reboots, does the same thing, reboots, rinse and repeat. At some point (sometimes after only 1 reboot, sometimes after 5 reboots), it stops with a black screen.

That's interesting. Actually if it worked, the screen posted by Jo22 (the first reply in this thread) would have appeared ~ one second after the dots - at the time where you get the reboot. So the floppy definitely doesn't work on your hardware. What graphic card and main board are you using?

clueless1 wrote:So what's supposed to happen when you boot the floppy? I'm trying it on "Hey not too rough" with a couple of S3 cards, and in both cases, what happens is the floppy starts to load, I see the letters "ae" followed by a bunch of dots that fill the screen while the floppy loads, then the system reboots, does the same thing, reboots, rinse and repeat. At some point (sometimes after only 1 reboot, sometimes after 5 reboots), it stops with a black screen.

That's interesting. Actually if it worked, the screen posted by Jo22 (the first reply in this thread) would have appeared ~ one second after the dots - at the time where you get the reboot. So the floppy definitely doesn't work on your hardware. What graphic card and main board are you using?

Tried with a few different S3 cards: Virge, Trio64V+, Trio64 V2/DX, and Virge GX. The system is a Packard Bell socket 5, with Intel 82430FX Triton chipset. The CPU is Pentium Overdrive 200MMX and it has 32MB EDO 72-pin RAM. I could try with a Pentium 100 CPU to see if the Overdrive is the issue.

edit: maybe the onboard graphics are getting in the way. The mainboard has CL-GD5430 built-in. It gets disabled when you put a PCI graphics card in, but maybe your program is still seeing it?

clueless1 wrote:edit: maybe the onboard graphics are getting in the way. The mainboard has CL-GD5430 built-in. It gets disabled when you put a PCI graphics card in, but maybe your program is still seeing it?

Hmm. CL-GD5430 might be recognized too. Can you try booting with just the onboard card?

clueless1 wrote:edit: maybe the onboard graphics are getting in the way. The mainboard has CL-GD5430 built-in. It gets disabled when you put a PCI graphics card in, but maybe your program is still seeing it?

Hmm. CL-GD5430 might be recognized too. Can you try booting with just the onboard card?

Then an intermediate level (I should have reserved a name between 1 and 2, but it occurred to me too late). Can you please try the attached floppy (it only works with VGA BIOS). It should get up to the "ok" prompt. If it doesn't - the firmware doesn't support the system chipset.

If it does, please try booting it with the V+ card, and CL disabled. Then at the "ok" prompt, type "show-devs". It should show you the device tree. Try to see if you have more than one /vga leaf. If there is just one, please issue the following commands:

(note there is a space before the ".") and tell me the numbers. If you enter a wrong character, backspace is working, but doesn't erase the characters on the screen. So either backspace, or just type the command again.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:If you need data for a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 I can test later. Its a 325 based card. Cant recall if mine is 2MB or 4MB though. I also think I have a Virge/DX somewhere.

Thanks! Although both 325 and Virge are already tested by Jo22, it's still interesting if they will work for you too: there were multiple revisions of the chips. For instance, it works on my 64V+, but for some reason doesn't work on the clueless1's 64V+.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:If you need data for a Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 I can test later. Its a 325 based card. Cant recall if mine is 2MB or 4MB though. I also think I have a Virge/DX somewhere.

Thanks! Although both 325 and Virge are already tested by Jo22, it's still interesting if they will work for you too: there were multiple revisions of the chips. For instance, it works on my 64V+, but for some reason doesn't work on the clueless1's 64V+.

Ok, After I looked I also have an APAC 64v but I likely wont test it as that cards caps need replaced although it does currently post.

The Stealth2000 is one of the most popular 325 models so its data should be particularly useful.

atar wrote:Then an intermediate level (I should have reserved a name between 1 and 2, but it occurred to me too late). Can you please try the attached floppy (it only works with VGA BIOS). It should get up to the "ok" prompt. If it doesn't - the firmware doesn't support the system chipset.

Nope, this one does the same thing. I guess it's a chipset issue then? I get the same issue with multiple types of S3 cards, so I don't think it has anything to do with my PCI graphics cards.

I did go into the BIOS and disable PCI Burst to see if it would help. It did not.

Yep. Looks like it. Do you by any chance have a more modern board where you can plug the cards and boot from a floppy? I know that 440BX works. In any case, thanks for trying and reporting. The negative results are valuable. I'll try to see what may go wrong on your chipset with emulators, but that's a shaky ground. Emulators mostly hit their own bugs and not the bugs of the original chips. For instance none of PCem, 86Box and Virtual PC implement all the sequencer registers of the S3 chipsets.